The word of the Lord remains for ever:
What is this word?
It is the Good News that has been brought to you. 1 PET 1:25
JEREMIAH 26:1-9
My Soul's Beloved,
The Church You founded preaches and teaches Your Word from the rising of the sun to its setting. Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, and his successors, together with the bishops speak in one voice and make known all that You desire God's chosen people to know so we may have eternal life. No one can claim ignorance, Lord. If we are ignorant of the Truth it is because we are indifferent; since access to the treasures of Your Word in Scripture and Sacred Tradition are freely and without cost available to all men and women who desire it.
Nations founded on Catholic principles ought by now to be so rooted and grounded in the Truth that they would be unmoved and unshaken, the truth however is that Satan has spread his errors and evil and the stench of decay and death is everywhere. You continue to call holy men and women as You did Jeremiah, entrusting them with the task of calling nations to repentance and to return to God. But they are laughed at, mocked, shamed, derided, punished, deprived of their rights, imprisoned, taken hostage, violently and physically assaulted and some are executed.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, if we continue to be spiritually indifferent to living the Gospel and drift further and further into leading lives of debauchery we ought not to be surprised when the wrath of God rises up against us and sweeps us off the face of the earth.
‘The Lord says this: Stand in the court of the Temple of the Lord. To all the people of the towns of Judah who come to worship in the Temple of the Lord you must speak all the words I have commanded you to tell them; do not omit one syllable. Perhaps they will listen and each turn from his evil way: if so, I shall relent and not bring the disaster on them which I intended for their misdeeds. Say to them, “The Lord says this: If you will not listen to me by following my Law which I put before you, by paying attention to the words of my servants the prophets whom I send so persistently to you, without your ever listening to them, I will treat this Temple as I treated Shiloh, and make this city a curse for all the nations of the earth.”’
PSALM 68(69):5,8-10,14
MATTHEW 13:54-58
My Soul's Beloved,
More numerous than the hairs on my head
are those who hate me without cause.
Those who attack me with lies
are too much for my strength.
How can I restore
what I have never stolen?
It is for you that I suffer taunts,
that shame covers my face,
that I have become a stranger to my brothers,
an alien to my own mother’s sons.
I burn with zeal for your house
and taunts against you fall on me.
This is my prayer to you,
my prayer for your favour.
In your great love, answer me, O God,
with your help that never fails.
In your great love, answer me, O God.
My Soul's Beloved,
It is in the nature of godless people to decry those who stir their conscience and point out their sins. Too often we refuse to acknowledge that the people whom we once knew in the past have grown and evolved. They are no longer the people we once knew but we obstinately refuse to accept them as they are presently and hold them hostage to our old memories of them. We do them and ourselves a great disservice when we lack the wisdom to understand that we ought not to become prisoners of our past nor should we imprison others. When we were children we acted as children but we grow, we mature, we change.
The people of Your hometown, Nazareth, were hidebound and victims of their narrow-mindedness. They missed their opportunity to claim the honor of knowing You as a child and youth and proudly accepting and rejoicing in the Man of God that You were now. They knew some facts about You - they knew Your Mother, her relatives, and Your father and his occupation as a carpenter, they dismissed You thinking they knew You.
When we are determined to ignore the truth because of the dramatic, life-changing impact it can have we condemn ourselves like the people of Your hometown did. Our poor, deluded protestant sisters and brothers are determined to dismiss the Truth because of pride that makes them hold on with mule-headed stubbornness to lies. Satan delights in them. He is the father of division and the alarming rate at which these churches splinter and form new groups is his work.
Generation after generation hands down their prejudice initiated by those prideful men and women who believed they knew more than the Holy Spirit and broke away from Mother Church. Cut off from her they wither and die. Their legacy is heresy upon heresy and the flourishing of sins since they lack a sacramental life.
But a new day is dawning, Lord. Truth is a Person, not a concept and eventually Truth will triumph because it is invincible and victorious.
Coming to his home town, Jesus taught the people in their synagogue in such a way that they were astonished and said, ‘Where did the man get this wisdom and these miraculous powers? This is the carpenter’s son, surely? Is not his mother the woman called Mary, and his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Jude? His sisters, too, are they not all here with us? So where did the man get it all?’ And they would not accept him. But Jesus said to them, ‘A prophet is only despised in his own country and in his own house’, and he did not work many miracles there because of their lack of faith.
